Po's Stash
by Zamael
Summary: What, did you really think he didn't have one?


A/C: This is what happens when I fix up something nigh incomprehensible together from my splintered thoughts in the middle of the night. I don't even know.

It probably takes place somewhere in between the two movies, I guess.

* * *

><p>Like any kid of a particular age, Po had a secret stash under his bed.<p>

No one but him knew of it, not even his father. The vast piles of text and pictures had brought him much joy and satisfaction during his teenage years, in the days when he had not many friends and so many unfulfilled dreams: he lived them through his stash, using them to fulfill his fantasies, forget his real boring life, often filling and expanding it, until it barely fit under the bed and behind all the boxes while being still invisible from a casual eye.

But that was largely in the past now. In the present day things were much better in that regard, what with him having made some actual friends, got to live the dream, and particularly gotten closer with Master Tigress, who had always been his favourite of the Furious Five and, as such, used to feature heavily in his fantasies. She would be the one most often at the central stage of things, along with Po himself, the rest of the Furious Five - as well as sometimes Master Shifu, and on occasion even Oogway - also heavily featured but ended up a little bit on the sidelines. It was Tigress that got the biggest piece of action, the one that got to share the spotlight with him the most, and the one most involved in every climax. But now that was all an actual part of his real life, so why live in fantasy when he could genuinely go out and do all those things?

The paper piles had been left to gather dust for a while now, as such, and he had not expanded on them much at all since beginning his new life. Until one fateful day, when he had somewhat unwisely let Master Monkey stay in his room without supervision (even if it was only like two minutes that he spent in the bathroom), and of course he had investigated a little too much and found Po's most special treasure trove, a blast from the past...

What were the odds he could keep it all to himself, instead of stealing a fair bit of the stuff and taking it for the rest of the Five to look at? Hahaha, yeah.

* * *

><p>It was a beautiful, uneventful, and all-around unawesome day in the Valley of Peace, when SUDDENLY like about ten thousand Ogres from the Ogre Caves below Ogre Mountains attacked! They were hairy and ugly and EVIL, and they wanted people to eat and had also heard that there was a lot of gold in the Jade Palace. So they marched up the long and treacherous and almost as evil stairs to get the gold!<p>

The Furious Five and Shifu and Oogway fought valiantly, especially Master Tigress who punched and kicked and clawed and blinded (with PURE AWESOMENESS!) like thousand of them by themselves. But there were just too many of the enemies, and finally they got in and tied them all up. They looked everywhere but didn't find the gold, so they dressed Master Viper, who was the girliest-

"What?"

-in a pretty dress to torture her and make her tell them about it. Tell us about the gold! they said. Never! she said. Tell us! they said. Never! she said but she was starting to feel a little bad in the dress and was almost telling them...

...When SUDDENLY a big and mighty panda warrior burst through the wall! The Furious Five knew him because they had heard all the legends of his awesomeness, but nobody told the legends down in Ogre Caves, so the ogres were all stupid and didn't know. Who are you? they asked. And how did you get here?

I blinded the guards with my awesomeness, he said. The awesomeness is free. Do you want some too?

What? they shouted, and attacked! But the legendary warrior beat them all up easily, then took the sword of heroes, and used it to cut the Furious Five loose and make ribbons out of Master Viper's very pretty dress that she didn't like! And then the Furious Five helped him against the other about eight thousand ogres, because that's a little too much even for a legendary warrior to deal with. And he fought back to back with Master Tigress and they kicked a lot of righteous butt!

And then the warrior and Master Tigress jumped into the middle of the ogre army and punched everybody that got close, except their combined awesomeness was already pretty much burning them so hard that they ran away! And then the warrior and Master Tigress chased them right back into their caves! But then the huge SUPEROGRE appeared, but the warrior and Master Tigress beat it up by tying its shoelaces! And THEN the warrior and Master Tigress-

"Give me that." Master Tigress snatched the stack of papers away from Master Mantis, who was reading it in a loud, booming, overdramatic voice. "The warrior and Master Tigress beat up more ogres... the warrior and Master Tigress form peace between ogres and the Valley of Peace... the warrior and Master Tigress are best friends and play board games together and...", she droned on as she skimmed through the pages: there were dozens of pages of this stuff here. "How old was he when he wrote this?"

"The legendary warrior and Master Crane go flying...", Mantis said out loud as he read the title of another paper stack, fairly thick but nowhere as much as the one Tigress had taken from him. "This one looks interesting. Perhaps I should read this one?"

"Don't," Crane said, nudging at the motionless furry lump on the floor under the table that was Master Monkey, concerned of his friend's wellbeing: the simian had fallen down a couple minutes ago, mid-laugh, a frozen grin still on his face, breathing laborously. "If he can still hear us, or wakes up in the middle of it, he'll probably die. Or at least hit his head on the table."

"But these are no fun if I cannot do a dramatic reading of them!", Mantis complained. "If I just read them for myself, then they're just... bad."

"Am I really girly?", Viper asked, clearly annoyed, examining herself and fixating to the end of her tail.

"I think what he said was that you were the girl_iest_," Crane corrected, "which really may not mean anything at all - what with the only other girl here being... you know." He nodded towards Tigress, who had stopped speaking a while ago and simply looked at the stack of papers in her hands. "What do you think, Tigress?"

"Hm?" She looked up towards them, blinking like she had just woken up from a long and vivid dream, then finally nodded. "Oh. Yes, really, Viper, it did not mean anything, when we think about the circumstances around it, and you really shouldn't take offense about something written by a child that, well, still is clearly a big fan. I'm sure he didn't meant offense: he was just being... well, Po. As a kid."

Viper was left to ponder this, as Tigress put her stack neatly in order, and placed it back on the table. "Also, someone should wake up Monkey, and tell him to take these back where he got them from."

"Aww, are you sure? But they're a laugh riot, if I could just rea-", Mantis began, but she gave him the look, and he quieted down almost instantly. They all knew better than to contest her authority when she looked at them that way, and so no one said a word against it anymore, and Viper descended down to nudge Monkey awake.

"And not a word about it for Po. _Ever_."

* * *

><p>She found him from the training hall. To be perfectly frank, when the panda first arrived to the Palace, she would not have guessed him to be one of the most dedicated of them in terms of improving himself, instead of, say, gorging himself with food or idling around: but here he was, stumbling across the Gauntlet of the Wooden Warriors like he did every day, consistently proving her wrong in her initial prediction.<p>

Not that he was still very good at it, mind- "Tigress!" ...And got distracted far too easily, she observed, as the briefest second he spent in noticing her, calling her name, and smiling at her, cost him dearly when a wooden club struck him in the back of his head, followed by a several more all across his body (except for one place, him having learned the lesson the first time), foiling his attempt to get out and greet the other master for a good half a minute, after which he finally floundered out of the gauntlet - only to strike his face straight against the Jade Tortoise. Tigress grimaced and hurried down to make sure he was all right.

"...Ow."

"I think you have had enough training for the day," she observed, checking his body for broken bones and to her relief finding none: it might have put a little bit of a damper on what she was here to suggest. He nodded, and managed a pained "Yeah," as he walked away and outside with her: "I spent like four hours here, I still can't stay on the edge of the Jade Tortoise, it took me twenty minutes to get one arrow out of my back, and I should probably avoid the Field of Fiery Death for a while because otherwise my fur will never grow back."

He pointed at a large bald spot on his lower back. "Have you... considered the punching doll again?", she asked carefully.

"Are you kidding me? That doll was the worst! You remember what happened the last time."

"You could just change its location. Perhaps take it outside?"

"That'd be cheating!"

Tigress did not respond, merely rolled her eyes.

They spent some time talking about the training hall, and just in what kind of mood Shifu was when he designed the place ("It was the first weekend after Tai Lung was imprisoned: he had a lot of time in his hands, and... yeah."), while Po recovered from his various injuries, but he had a remarkable healing factor, even for a kung fu master (it had something to do with tai chi), and so this did not take long. As the subject matter turned elsewhere, she finally brought up why she had sought him out to begin with:

"Hey, do you want to maybe go somewhere and have a round of Mahjong or something?", Tigress asked about as casually and nonchalantly as she could, almost in the middle of Po wondering about whether it was all the food he ate ("fast metablawhatever...") that allowed him to recover so quickly. He stopped in his tracks and simply looked at her for a bit.

"Uh... wait, did you just ask me to... play Mahjong with you?"

"Yes." She nodded, smiling. "Why not? It, well, it could be fun."

His confusion over the matter did not last long before his fanboyish glee once again took over, a wide grin appearing on his face as he begun walking again. "Yeah! Wow, I can't imagine you actually want to go and do something non-kung fu with me! Can you even play Mahjong?"

She shrugged. "...It's just a game. How difficult can it be?"

"Oh-hoh-hoh-hoo boy, you're in for a bit of hard time." He just grinned. "Seriously, I think you're a little too old to start now, but we can see if I can teach you the basics and then we can have a simple game or two together... let's go to my place, I have an old game set there. Just don't challenge dad, he's pretty much the master of China in this game!" He paused. "No really, I think he has an award for it and everything... hey, you know this was pretty much my secret dream? You know, get to play games with you?"

"I had no idea..." Tigress just shook her head, smiled mysteriously, and walked on.

Meanwhile, obedient as ever, Master Monkey had taken the stacks of paper and returned them to where he had originally found them from - all but one, now well-hidden under Tigress's own sleeping mat. It had very little text, most of the room taken by a large, meticulously scribbled drawing, depicting the legendary panda warrior holding hands with all of Furious Five, who were according to the writing under the picture, his "very best friends in the whole world".


End file.
